Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (19 December 1906-10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 14 October 1964 to 10 November 1982, succeeding Nikita Khrushchev and preceding Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev was a political commissar of the Red Army during World War II, as a member of the Politburo during the 1950s, and as Second Secretary of the CCCP in 1964, and in 1964 he betrayed Khrushchev by having him voted out of office. He led the Soviet Union as the General Secretary, and he was its leader at the time of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War, being an aggressive Soviet leader and a major world leader; Brezhnev ended Khrushchev's liberalizing reforms and made the USSR a powerful country and a danger to the United States and the West.
Biography[]
Brezhnev in 1953
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Dniprodzerzhynsk, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine). Brezhnev was the son of a metalworker, and he was educated in the iron and steel industries of Ukraine under the Soviet Union following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1929, and in 1939 he became Party Secretary in Dnipropetrovsk, rising to become a political commissar in the Red Army during World War II. Brezhnev ended the war in Prague as political commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front, and in August 1946 he left the military as a Major-General. Brezhnev rose in the Communist Party's ranks during the 1950s, joining the Politburo after meeting Joseph Stalin. He helped in defeating Georgy Malenkov's Stalinist Anti-Party Group, rising in the ranks under Nikita Khrushchev until he became his deputy in 1964. On 14 October 1964, after Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny gathered a group of politicians in the Politburo to depose Khrushchev, Khrushchev was removed from office and Brezhnev became the new General-Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. He ended Khrushchev's liberalizing reforms and had a conservative and regressive attitude, suppressing cultural freedom and putting down liberalizing Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Brezhnev's tenure as leader of the USSR saw Brezhnev resume negotiations with the United States in "detente", seeking to equalize the strength of the USSR and USA by increasing the military spending of the country. Brezhnev fought America in proxy wars, giving support to North Vietnam against the US-backed South Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, supporting Vietnam against the US and China-backed Khmer Rouge in the Vietnamese-Cambodian War, and supporting various communist movements in Africa such as the MPLA in Angola and the Derg in Ethiopia against the US allies. In 1968, the Sino-Soviet split divided the former Comintern alliance, and China became its own faction leader, with Cambodia being its main ally; Brezhnev allied with Vietnam and North Korea. The 1975 Helsinki Accords with President Gerald Ford legitimatized the USSR's dominance in Eastern Europe, and the Soviets tried to influence Asia with the Treaty of Tashkent in 1965 ending the Second Indo-Pakistani War with Soviet-backed India winning, and the Soviets sent troops to Afghanistan to assist the communist government there in 1978. The Soviet-Afghan War was the last major conflict that Brezhnev had the Soviets be involved in, and the Americans and Chinese helped the Mujahideen resistance of Ahmad Shah Massoud fight against the Soviet Army and the communist Afghans. Brezhnev died in 1982, having been the most popular Russian leader of the 20th century.